For this week, my supervisor and I turned our focus a bit more towards the Women of Color Owned Summer Market. This is an annual tradition at Zora’s House, and is geared towards creating opportunities for women of color (WoC) to connect with other like-minded women and (for the vendors in particular) gain new customers. The application process for potential vendors had been open for a few weeks, and we received applications from a variety of businesses. We closed the applications on Monday, and were mostly focused on deciding which vendors would be a part of the Summer Market so that those decisions could be sent out as soon as possible. My supervisor wanted to hear my input about which vendors would be a good fit, and it was really cool to have the opportunity to be a part of the decision making process, especially since I’ve seen how excited everyone at Zora’s House is about this event. Due to the pandemic, there won’t be as many vendors allowed as in previous years, so having to choose a small number of vendors out of a big pool of cool businesses was a bit difficult. However, I liked having the opportunity to learn more about various WoC-owned small businesses in Columbus that I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. Once we were finally able to choose, I emailed all of the organizations to let them know whether they were allowed to be vendors for the Summer Market. (For anyone interested in supporting WoC-owned and Black-owned businesses in Columbus, click here for a list of businesses.)

Regarding my other work with the employee and operations manuals, we are starting to move towards the drafting stage for those documents. Today, we completed the revision process of the employee manual with the Operations, Infrastructure, and Culture committee, and now I have all of their suggestions in order to create a fully revised version of the document. Although the document is relatively new (the founder of Zora’s House created this document in the past 1-2 years), there are still a significant amount of details that need to be expanded on, topics that need to be included, etc. This is because the document is intended to help carry Zora’s House through their expansion and transition into their new space in the next 5 years or so. With all of the suggestions, concerns, and revisions done with the committee, I feel confident that the revised document can help aid Zora’s House in their transition period, although I also need to consider my wording to ensure that they have the flexibility necessary during this period. I’m excited to be able to complete the first draft soon, and continue to move forward with this project.